Tag Archives: youtube

A month ago I started talking to the YouTube specialists about monetizing my YouTube videos. I thought I had made some progress even though I was being shuffled between different customer service managers for several weeks. Today I got my revised and same answer.

So I hipped Adam to my previous history of “violations.”

AND that did it.

He viewed three of the posts about my past problems with AdSense.

And then sent this response. Um, thanks Adam.

And while I asked Adam, “Why?” I’m pretty sure I’ve heard the last from the YouTube Team.

What’s the value of creating YouTube videos of your business ideas? And if YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine after Google, doesn’t that mean Google owns everything? Here are the results of my video efforts on YouTube. Perhaps I need to try Vimeo too.

SUMMARY: I had 1,200+ views of my videos on YouTube, primarily viewed from my blog. So while the Videos themselves did not drive traffic from YouTube to Uber.la, the value of having video content, and the resulting 600 views a month is nothing to sneeze at. So it may not have been what I expected, but SEO for YouTube in the “social media” space is pretty hard to get traction.

Okay, that’s all well and good, but let’s see if any YouTube traffic came the other way. (YouTube > to > Uber.la) Here are my Google Analytics Referrals for the last 60 days:

click to see full-size chart

So from this metric, I’m not seeing the traffic love coming to my blog FROM YouTube. And surprizingly, even though I socialize with Digg on every post, I got FOUR referrals in 60 days. (My how the Digg has fallen!)

The most interesting statistic for referrals was how much better the referrals were from LinkedIN. A lot fewer bounces, a lot longer on the site and the highest number of pages visited. So my previous recommendation on LinkedIN is still proving to be on target, for my specific niche and social media strategy topics.

Was the YouTube content worth it? Absolutely. 1,200+ views is better than I had hoped for. I have a few more videos in the hopper that I want to get out there in the next week. And the good thing is, most of the videos are “evergreen.” (Meaning they are relevant long past the posting date: everyone needs to learn Google Analytics at some point.) I am building up my resource library, and hopefully providing a service for free.

Update: Today I turned off my Blip.fm to Twitter connection. While I was enjoying the DJ aspect of Blip, I was also aware that the “value” of my Tweets were NOT in musical recommendations. So rather than flooding my twitter stream with blips I am now keeping Blip to itself and adding them to my FriendFeed stream rather than broadcasting them on Twitter.

There is a universal thread that is beginning to run through many of my networks. I call it Music Discovery, but it goes by the names of Blip.fm, Last.fm, Bebo, Pandora, Reverbnation (on Facebook) and many others. And what makes this network different from any others is the nature of the connection is MUSIC. I will cover each of these services in subsequent posts.

So unless you are in the music business, there is no ROI on participating in this game. But what it has given me, in terms of “discovery” over the last three years is amazing and I wanted to share a bit about how the services work. If you are not a music fanatic, then you might want to skip off to another post. But if you are interested in finding new songs, new bands, and exploring the non-business aspect of social media, then this could be fun.

For this first post I am going to share my newest favorite Blip.fm and the most recent blow-your-head-off discovery that I made using Blip “Again And Again – Bird And The Bee” http://ff.im/-38KTY

Here’s how that looks in my tweetstream. (not anymore, see update above)

And on Blip, if you are looking at the a playlist, it would look like this:

Or on the public timeline, it would look like this.

So imagine a Twitter timeline, that is just passing songs that people are promoting as virtual DJs. TweetJays perhaps.

So here’s a look at the public timeline, and the magic that is Blip.

It looks like Twitter doesn’t it? So the cool part is the little red “play” link will start the song immediately, no lag. So scrolling down the list, I can choose a familiar song, CSN’s “Teach Your Children” or I can click on a song/artist I’ve never heard of. And from this process alone, I have discovered the following bands/songs recently. And these are the ones that have floored me with their originality.

I might have heard OF them, or heard ONE of their hits, but these bands are now in my high rotation slot. [Okay, so here’s where the business comes in, Blip does make it easy to BUY the music, with handy links to Amazon and iTunes. And I highly recommend you buy them. But listening on Blip.fm is FREE FREE FREE, kinda like Radio.]

So here’s what a blip looks like as I am creating it:

And let me dissect the blip for you. Nada Surf – the band, “Always Love” the song title, @lucianan the person who bliped the song originally, I am REBLIPPING his selection and thus giving him credit (just like a ReTweet but a ReBlip). then I give a short snippet of the lyrics that are meaningful to me “to make a mountain of your life is just a choice” and finally, I am leaving @lucianan’s comment in what looks to be Portuguese. And when I hit the OK button, it puts my blip on the public timeline and it also blips the song to my Twitter stream. [I am thinking about this, because I usually control my Tweets pretty judiciously, and I am not sure about the “value” of putting all my musical blips out there, but I’m still thinking about this.]

I would like to hip you to a couple of bands I have been grooving out to, and longing to sound like, but probably won’t.